The Judge

The Prophecies of Jesus: —

Matthew vii. 21-23; viii. 12, 13; x. 15, 23, 32-42; xi. 20-24; ii, 3 2 i

36, 40-42; xiii. 30, 37-43. 49; 5° 5 x vi 18, 21, 27, 28; xvii. 9, 22,

23; xviii. 8, 9; xix. 28-30; xx. 19, 23; xxi. 43, 44; xxii. 1-14;

xxiii. 34-39; xxiv.; xxv.; xxvi. 12, 13, 29, 31, 32, 34, 64; xxvii.

63; xxviii. 10. Mark iii. 29; vi. II; viii. 31, 38; ix. I, 9, 31, 41-49; x. 30, 31, 34, 40;

xii. 9; xiii.; xiv. 8, 9, 18, 27, 28, 30, 62. Luke vi. 22, 23; ix. 26, 27; x. 12-15; xi - 2 9”3 2 49-5 1 1 xi >- 8-12,

35-59; xiii. 23-35; xiv -: 5- 2 4; xvii. 22-37; xviii. 8, 29, 30, 33;

xix. 11-27, 41-44; xx - 9-l8; xxi. 5-36; xxii. 18, 21, 29, 30, 34,

69; xxiii. 43; xxiv. 49.

VI

T P to this point I have said nothing of a possible

^-^ development in the mind of Jesus. Did His

views alter as His life went on? The declaration

about His childhood, that He increased in wisdom

and stature and in favour with God and man,

*Weiss: Lehrbuch der biblischen Theologie des neuen Testaments,

§33-

Beyschlag: Neutestamentliche Theologie, I. 183 ff.

Holtzmann: Neutestamentliche Theologie, I. 305 ff.

Stevens: The Theology of the New Testament, chapter XII.

Bruce: The Kingdom of God, cc. XII and XIII.

Wendt: Die Lehre Jesu, II. 542 ff.

Baldensperger: Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu, cc. VIII. and IX.

Weiffenbach: Der Wiederkunftsgedanke Jesu, 1873.

Russell: The Parousia, 1887, pt. I.

Haupt: Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den synoptischen Evangelien, 1895.

Schwartzkopff: Die Weissagungen Jesu Christi von seinem Tode, seiner Auferstehung und Wiederkunft, 1895.

McCheyne Edgar: The Gospel of a Risen Saviour, 1892.

Salmond: The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, 1898.

Mackintosh: Essays towards a New Theology, 1889. Second Essay: The Biblical Doctrines of Judgment and Immortality.

justifies us in looking out for the signs of such a development. Time and circumstances acted on Him as they do on all men, widening the horizon of knowledge and making clear the path of duty. Even His comprehension of Himself had its human limitations.

I do not, indeed, believe that it is possible to fix definite points in His life and to say, that up to these junctures He had never thought or spoken about certain aspects of His person or work, and that everything which the Evangelists represent Him as saying on these topics before the assumed dates must be treated as misplaced. By such arbitrary assumptions not only have the records been cruelly distorted, but an image of Jesus has been constructed as untrue to psychology as it is unjust to the testimony of those who knew Him best. All we can do is to note the great turning-points of His experience and the predominant characteristics of the sections of His life thereby marked out. We can say for certain that at suchand-such a period His mind was possessed with this or that aspect of His mission; but to affirm that anything essential was at any stage altogether absent from His consciousness is to abandon the terra firma of evidence and let ourselves go adrift on a sea of mere speculation.

There are five conspicuous summits of His experience, with which we may connect the different epochs of His internal history — His First Visit to Jerusalem, His Baptism, the Great Confession of the Twelve at Ca?sarea Philippi, the Transfiguration, and the Agony of Gethsemane.

1. The first epoch is that of His first thirty years. It lies beneath a thick covering of silence, but it must have contained everything. Like musical genius, the religious faculty matures early. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” it has been said; but it lies far more about us in boyhood and youth. The intuition of God in the opening dawn of intelligence is extraordinarily clear, as is also the intuition of right and wrong; there is no problem of religion which has not presented itself to the questioning mind of a sharp-witted lad; there is no criticism of the world’s institutions and practices so keen as that of youth, before its own time for action has arrived; and every possibility of subsequent achievement is dreamed about by a man before he is thirty. “What is a great life? It is a thought conceived in the enthusiasm of youth and carried out with the strength of maturity.” *

Only one incident of this period in the life of

* Alfred de Vigny.

Jesus has been preserved; but it is sufficient to suggest all. It reveals a mind happy, on the one hand, in the consciousness of God and, on the other, reverently inquisitive at the oracles of human authority. Already Jesus called God “My Father”; and, although we must beware of reading too much into this primary confession, there lies in it the germ of all that was most original in His subsequent doctrine. On the other hand, His ardent attachment to the temple and His thirst for instruction from the custodians of the oracles of God were foreshadowings of the opposite quality of His mind — His reverence for the institutions and traditions of the past. Thus, in miniature, are the two outstanding features of His ministry already discernible — His incomparable originality and His adherence to all that was true and sacred in the history of His native land.

2. The second epoch is introduced by the threefold crisis of the preaching of John, the baptism of Jesus, and the temptation. It is generally assumed that at His baptism Jesus first became aware of His messiahship; but of this it is impossible to be sure. The only thing certain is, that He then received the signal that the time was fulfilled, along with the final qualification for His public work imparted through the descent on Him of the Holy

Spirit* But He may long have been waiting for the striking of the hour of destiny. At all events, when it came, it produced a prolonged access of emotion and thought, as is indicated by His being driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. The struggle which there took place in His soul was a conflict between traditionalism and originality; but it ended in the clear and unalterable resolution to follow His own genius. This, He well knew, would arouse the opposition of the representatives of religious and political authority; but He was far too full of divine enthusiasm for His great task to stand in dread of obstacles. It was with a rush of joy and hope which carried all before it that His ministry began. His own state of mind at this period stands forever embodied in the Beatitudes, which are a description not only of the character which He desired to produce in others but first of all of His own. They betray a mind so full of a blessedness springing from inexhaustible sources that it longs to assemble round itself the whole world of weary and suffering humanity, in order to make it happy by the communication of its own secret. Such was the character of the opening months of

* It is astonishing how the best results of modern inquiry into this crisis in the experience of Jesus are anticipated in Owen’s great work on The Holy Spirit.

His ministry: He was happy in proclaiming the message with which He was charged and in performing the works of mercy which the Father had given Him to do; and the images which floated before the eyes of His spirit were irradiated with the hues of hope.

3. This epoch was followed by one of a totally different character, when the opposition which He had to encounter assumed such dimensions that He was compelled to see, rising to block His pathway in the distance, the image of the cross. In the Evangelists this third epoch is dated from the great confession at Csesarea Philippi, although that event only brought to light a condition of the mind of Jesus which must already have been for some time in existence. The great confession was, indeed, much more an epoch in the development of the disciples than in that of Christ Himself; and the failure to note this has led to much confusion of thought. It has even been contended that up to this point He was not fully conscious Himself of His messiahship; and it is assumed that at least He cannot have mentioned it before this, even to the extent of calling Himself the Son of man. Much more is it held to be evident that the disciples can never previously have acknowledged His messiahship in any shape or form. To support these assumptions the most violent measures have to be taken with the evangelic records; and the true nature of the great confession is mistaken.

It was, in the first place, in the fullest sense the testimony of the Twelve themselves. Herein lay its value. It was not something which others had suggested to them and which they accepted on external authority, whether from the Baptist, or from the demoniacs, or even from Jesus Himself, but the spontaneous expression of their own conviction, matured by long association with Him and by daily observation of His life. The suggestion, that He was the Messiah, had long been in the air; they had heard it from several quarters; but to every such witness they could have said at Caesarea Philippi, as the Samaritans did to their countrywoman, “Now we believe, not because of thy saying; for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” Secondly, it was a great religious act. It was not the cold drawing of a logical conclusion, but an uprising of conviction and devotion, in which they avowed that they would stand by the truth in face of contradiction, whatever might happen; and, therefore, Jesus traced it back to immediate inspiration from above. Such an act is a totally different thing from a mere expression of opinion, and does not of itself determine whether or not the same persons may have previously held the opinion now transmuted into an act of witness-bearing. Jesus had not imposed His belief on the disciples: He waited patiently till the conviction should arise in themselves of its own accord; and it was because this stage of maturity had been reached that He considered it judicious to communicate to them the conclusion at which He had arrived as to His own fate — “From that time forth began Jesus to show unto His disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem and suffer many things.” *

4. I have said that the great confession was more an epoch in the experience of the disciples than of their Master; yet to Him also it must have been an event full of satisfaction and joy; and it paved the way for the next epoch of His development, which consisted in the victory of His mind over the awful prospect of death. The maturity of the faith of the disciples, which expressed itself in their confession, caused Him to feel that He had something solid beneath His feet, which would not give way, whatever might be the changes or chances of the future, because it

* Matt. xvi. 21.

was the work of God in the hearts of the disciples. An early death seemed, indeed, to be the end of everything for one who professed to be the Messiah; because the Messiah was not to die but reign for evermore. It seemed the complete falsification of His faith in Himself. Certainly it appeared so to every Israelite, even to the most instructed of the Twelve. But Jesus saw over and beyond the awful terror; and the event which discloses the definite surmounting of this stage of development is the Transfiguration. On the Holy Mount joy and insight had obviously overcome all obscuration and eclipse; in the brightness in which His person was enveloped His glorification was anticipated; and again the voice from heaven, which had sounded at His baptism, ratified His consciousness of Himself. We now know the solution of the enigma: His death was to be the atonement for the sin of the world; and, as a reward for His uttermost humiliation, God was to raise Him to the throne which He now occupies. And that this was the solution presented to Himself is indicated by the representation that Moses and Elias talked with Him about the decease which He was to accomplish at Jerusalem. These were the representatives of law and prophecy; and the death of Christ was to be the glorious end of the law, as His exaltation was to be the fulfilment of all prophecy.*

5. The victory of the Transfiguration was not, however, a final and conclusive one. It astonishes us to come, so long afterwards, upon the scene of Gethsemane, with which we connect the fifth and last stage of His development. Gethsemane looks like a lapse back into the darkness of the third stage, out of which in the Transfiguration He had emerged. It may be taken to indicate that during the later months of His life there had been alternations in His soul between the terror of death and the sense of victory; and many things indicate that this supposition is not mistaken. Especially as death itself drew near and the horrors of desertion and betrayal, injustice and hatred, with which it was to be accompanied, began to accumulate before His eyes; as human sin, directed against Himself, disclosed its uttermost malignity and hideousness; and as the iron of his position, in the character of representative before God of this guilty humanity, entered into His soul, the darkness

* The presence of these two may also be intended to suggest the means by which His mind attained to the position of mastery over His fate; as, after His resurrection, in His intercourse with the disciples, “beginning’ at Moses and the prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.”

enveloping His mind intensified, till the sense of it grew to be an agony. But it must not be forgotten that Gethsemane was a victory and not a defeat. He overcame the horror and despair, and emerged calm and confident, ready to face the very worst. Once again, indeed, as He hung on the cross, the refluent wave swept over His soul, till He cried out, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” but again the access of troubled feeling was transitory; and it was with a strong voice and in perfect peace that at last He gave up the ghost. He knew that He was not dying in vain; nor were wicked men merely taking His life from Him: but, with prophetic eye. He already saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied.

Both the interest and the difficulty of the development of the thoughts of Jesus about Himself concentrate themselves in His utterances about the portion of His destiny which was to come after His death. Those of His contemporaries who waited for the kingdom of God never thought of more than one appearing of the Messiah. The conceptions of the immediate followers of Jesus were similar; and during the first period of His ministry it seemed as if His destiny were to consist in a continuous and culminating series of successes. But gradually there disclosed itself, lying across His path, a dark gulf of misfortune, defeat and death, into which He and His fortunes were to be precipitated. To all others this disappointment was final; even His disciples could not understand that it was possible for His cause to disappear at this point and ever emerge again. But His eye saw farther, and He was able to accept death as the will of God, and yet look forward to a new career on the opposite side of it.

He foresaw and foretold especially three events — His Resurrection, His Coming-again, and the Judgment.

That He foretold His rising from the dead the third day is one of the facts most distinctly and unanimously testified by the Evangelists. They connect His announcement of this event with the first announcement of His death, and on every occasion when the latter occurs the former occurs likewise. Nor is there any chance in this: it belongs to the reason of the case; for what a dismal and meaningless prediction would His death have been, unless He had been able to accompany it with the assurance that He was to rise again.

In the whole field of the modern interpretation of the past I do not remember anything less creditable than the manner in which this prediction is dealt with by large sections of contemporary scholarship. Fixing on a prophecy of Hosea in the mere sound of which there is a superficial resemblance to the words of Jesus — “After two days will He revive us; in the third day He will raise us up; and we shall live in His sight” — they assume that Jesus had this passage in His mind, and that, as Hosea meant by “the third day” a brief but indeterminate period, therefore Jesus intended no more than to intimate that after a vague but brief interval of eclipse His cause would revive. The supposed reference to Hosea is so dubious, and the ignoring of the actual place which this prediction holds in the history of Christianity is so complete, that it is difficult to treat such an interpretation seriously.

The “third day” may be objected to because it is a specific prediction. Prophecy, it is contended, is not of events or dates, but of general principles, the view of prophecy being antiquated and exploded which found in the prophetic writings history written beforehand. This is very true; and it applies specially to the prophecies of Jesus, beneath which there lie always deep and broad religious principles; even this prophecy of His own resurrection is founded, as we have just seen, in the nature of the case. Yet there is another aspect of prophecy which ought not to be forgotten, and which is, indeed, at the present moment successfully challenging the attention of Old Testament students: * wherever there is prophecy of the more general kind, there is, though in much smaller quantity, prediction of the specific kind. This can easily be proved in the books of the Old Testament; and it is conspicuous in the words of Christ. Towards the close of His life especially we find such specific predictions as the treachery of Judas and the fall of Peter; and the day of His own resurrection is a prophecy of the same kind.

The real objection, however, to the third day is the disbelief that any such event as the bodily resurrection of our Lord actually happened. The spread of scepticism on this point in the theological schools of the Continent is by far the most serious feature of the history of religious opinion during the last decade of the nineteenth century; and, as it has become the fashion, it may spread much farther. Its fruits have still to be seen in the practical life of the Church. My own belief is, that, were it to

* See Giesebrecht, Die Berufsbegabung der P?-opheten, 1898, where the author, who was an adherent of the more extreme school of Old Testament criticism, gives a most interesting account of the process by which he was convinced of the presence, in considerable quantities, in the Prophets of specific predictions which were fulfilled.

become general, Christianity would wither at its veryroot.

What is maintained is, that Jesus only foretold in a vague and general way that His cause would revive in a short time. And this, it is held, was what happened. After the first stupefaction was over, the disciples awoke to realise that their Master, though His body was in the grave, still existed in another state of being; and so by degrees they got over their depression and resumed the work which He had dropped. Of course this is in open and violent contradiction to the story which the apostles told and which from their day to this has been at the heart of the creed of Christendom. Though their story is beset with many difficulties, yet it has a wonderful verisimilitude. It is supernatural, and yet most natural. Could anything bear the print of nature more legibly than the interview between Mary and Jesus at the sepulchre, or the twin scenes in which St. Thomas appears first as a violent doubter and then as a believer crying, “My Lord and my God”? Yet it is not by its contradiction to the evangelic record that the theory is condemned, so much as by its failure, from the psychological and historical point of view, to give an adequate explanation of the origin of Christianity. By those who deny the facts of the resurrection it is constantly

IS taken for granted that the apostolic circle was in tremulous expectation of something extraordinaryhappening, and that the miracle was believed to have taken place because it answered to this expectation. Nothing, however, could be more completely the reverse of the truth, if any credit whatever is to be given to the records; for, according to them, the faith of the disciples had been stricken dead. The two travellers to Emmaus spoke of their hope as something which the death of their Master had utterly destroyed. The tale of the holy women seemed “idle” to those who heard it, “and they believed them not.” Even of the five hundred who saw Jesus on the mountain of Galilee “some doubted.”* To all appearance, in short, the movement of Jesus was completely at an end; His pretensions had been falsified by death — the last of all arguments — and nothing was left to His followers but to return to Galilee and hide their heads in shame and sorrow as mistaken and disappointed men. Such was the condition of the disciples when their Master died; yet within six weeks they were completely transformed: their faith in Christ and Christianity had revived; they were united and resolute, overflowing with enthusiasm

* Luke xxiv. 21, n; Matt, xxviii. 17.

and eager for action; and they were ready to lay down their lives for the testimony which they bore to Jesus. Between the death of Jesus and the day of Pentecost some event must have happened sufficient to account for such a transformation; they say themselves that it was the bodily resurrection and the ascension of their Master, and this would account for it; but the wit of man will never be able to devise another explanation which has even the appearance of likelihood. If Jesus had not risen, there would never have been a resurrection of Christianity.

The second event predicted by Jesus was His coming-again; and it is in connexion with this that we meet with the most perplexing of His sayings. These are seized upon with avidity by unbelievers as affording conclusive disproof of His authority; and many who love Him have felt with pain how difficult it is to reconcile them with absolute faith in His wisdom. The latest commentator on them, indeed, Dr. Erich Haupt, of Halle, concludes a detailed and careful examination with the assertion, that “we do not require to excuse Christ for His eschatology: in this region also He stands above His age, and what He has said fully participates in the authority of His words as well as of His person”; but he reaches this result only by the use of critical processes of elimination to which in this country we are not accustomed; and most of his readers will probably feel that he carries a figurative method of interpretation somewhat to excess.

There is one saying of Jesus on this subject to which we cannot be wrong in attributing cardinal importance. It is that in which He says that He is Himself ignorant of the day and the hour.* So utterly unlike is this to anything which a dogmatic Christianity would have been likely to attribute to Him, if He had not said it, that it may not only be reckoned among the most certain of His utterances, but allowed a regulative authority in the interpretation of others.

The chief difficulty is, that in other passages He does seem to fix the day and the hour. In His address to the Twelve, as He sends them forth on their mission, He says, that they will not have gone over the cities of Israel before the Son of man be come; on another occasion He says, “There be some standing here which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in His kingdom;” and — most important of all — in the great eschatological discourse of the twenty-fourth of St. Matthew, after

* Matt. xxiv. 36.

describing what appears to be the end of the world, He adds, “Verily, I say unto you, This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.”* Such passages appear to stand in direct contradiction to the one already quoted as cardinal and regulative; but, unless we are to suppose either that Jesus contradicted Himself or that He has been misreported by the Evangelists, a meaning must be found which does not involve the fixing of the day and the hour.

Haupt contends that the “coming” of which Jesus speaks is not always to be understood as the final one. Any conspicuous event in the history of Christianity may be spoken of under this designanation; which might, for example, be applied to His own resurrection, or to Pentecost, or to the destruction of Jerusalem. The destruction of Jerusalem, especially, bulked largely in Christ’s view of the future; there is no reason to doubt that He foretold it; and there were very good reasons why He should even predict its date. To one or other, therefore, of these events His references to the immediate future must belong.f The most difficult passage to reconcile with this view is the one

* Matt. x. 23; xvi. 28; xxiv. 34.

t Russell, in The Parousia, argues ably that all the prophecies of Jesus were fulfilled in a single generation.

already mentioned in the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew; but it is worth noting that this verse is almost identical with one in the preceding chapter,* where the reference manifestly is to the destruction of Jerusalem; and it is possible that there may have occurred an accidental reduplication. It cannot be denied that in the twenty-fourth of St. Matthew, and the corresponding passages in the second and third Gospels, there is a strange mixingup of what looks like the prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem with what looks like the description of the end of the world; and the one is represented as ensuing immediately upon the other. Beyschlag proposes here to apply the law of what is known in the interpretation of prophecy as Timelessness, the meaning of which is, that in the Prophets the sheet of the future is not outspread in such a way that the distance from point to point can be measured upon it, but is folded up in such a way that only a few successive outstanding events appear, while the spaces of time that are to intervene between them disappear, f Weiss applies the still more important principle, that prophecy is always conditional. God never says, through the lips of any prophet, what is

* xxiii. 36.

t Compare Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality p. 304.

to happen, whether in the form of weal or woe, without a reference either expressed or understood to human conduct. On the contrary, He even runs the risk of appearing to contradict Himself by leaving prophecies of good unfulfilled, when men sin, and of evil unfulfilled, when they repent. The great purpose of Jesus in all He says about the future is not to satisfy curiosity but to direct conduct, the sum of His teaching being an urgent admonition to watchfulness. Whether or not He represented the end as near, He certainly never intended it to be thought of as distant; and He does not intend it to be ever thus thought of. Christians can hasten it by their activity or postpone it by their negligence; and, however long He may delay His coming, the proper attitude of the Church will always be to be ready to receive Him every moment.

There are, besides, many other sayings of Jesus about the future which seem to reveal His deeper mind, and in which He appears to contemplate for Christianity a prolonged earthly history. Such is the passage in which He says that, before the end come, the Gospel shall be preached through all the world as a witness unto all nations; and side by side with it may be placed the saying about the woman who anointed His feet, that wheresoever the

Gospel was preached in the whole world, her act would be repeated as a memorial of her love.* There is a whole series of parables in which He speaks of His kingdom as passing through a gradual development; and there are others in which He speaks about it as being taken from the Jews and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. Those who were first invited to the banquet of the Gospel refused the King’s invitation with scorn, and on their heads had to descend the retribution they deserved; but still the wedding was to be furnished with guests: the servants of the king were to be sent into the streets and lanes of the city, and, when, after that, there still was room, they were to be sent farther off, to the highways and hedges. These parables reveal the most profound consciousness both of the real nature of the Gospel and of the actual course of human history, as time has revealed it; and it is not fair to the record either to leave them out of account or to attenuate their importance.f

The method of interpreting the consciousness of

* Matt xxiv. 14; xxvi. 13.

t Titius draws attention to the fact that Jesus’ views of married life, riches and poverty, and similar matters, are not influenced by reference to the nearness of the end of the world. — Die N. T. Lehre von der Seligkeit, I. 72, 75, 80.

Jesus which has of late secured most favour among the younger theologians of Germany is that which accords a predominant influence in the formation of His ideas to the environment in which He grew up; and the account given by this school of the development of His thoughts about Himself is determined by this point of view. The knowledge that He was the Messiah came to Him, it is supposed, suddenly at His baptism; and, as His conception of what the destiny of the Messiah was to be agreed in general outline with that entertained by His contemporaries, He expected the will of God to be fulfilled for Himself in the catastrophic forms of the Jewish apocalyptic literature, one grand event succeeding another as in the popular programme. The city of God would descend from heaven in a visible shape; all opposition would be swept out of the way by omnipotent force; and the end of the world would ensue. As the miracles of Jesus are not estimated highly by this school, being supposed to have consisted in a few simple cures, it is held that they cannot have answered to the expectations entertained by Him of what the Father was to do for His chosen agent. All the time, accordingly, He was waiting for a manifestation of omnipotent power which never came. At length His popularity declined, opposition grew irresistible, and death stared Him in the face. How was the mystery of delay to be interpreted? At this point occurred to Him the solution offered by a division of the messianic programme into two parts: die He must, but after death He would return again, when all the glory would be given Him which He had waited for in vain; and this second coming He believed would take place within a generation.

Fascinating as this reading of the history is, especially when set forth with the literary skill of a writer like Baldensperger, it does not present an image of Christ which can satisfy those who seriously accept Him as the final Revealer of truth and the Saviour of the world; for it is the picture of One who lived in an atmosphere of illusion and bequeathed to His followers something very like a delusion. It is not so intended, but it really revives the situation in which Jesus was placed by His enemies when they applied to Him the standard of their own messianic programme and rejected Him because He did not fulfil it. So, this modern theory imputes to Him a programme which was not fulfilled, and the inevitable inference against Him will not fail to be drawn by the general mind, however scholars may attempt to ignore the logic of their own position.

No doubt all the thoughts of Jesus were coloured by the atmosphere in which He grew up; but it was not by apocryphal literature but by the Law and the Prophets that the substance of them was determined; and His whole life, from the temptation in the wilderness to the death on the cross, was a polemic against contemporary Jewish thought. Rejecting the popular Messianic ideals, He remained true, at the risk of His life, to His own deep and spiritual conception of His vocation. And, since in life He so severely adhered to His own vision, is it credible that in His hopes for the future He abandoned Himself to the fantastic and deceptive imagery of Jewish apocalyptic? This would lower Him to the level of His contemporaries, and would be a fatal flaw in His character.

There is one circumstance the bearing of which on this question is of great importance, though it has been little adverted to. It is not denied that Jesus had in His mind a somewhat extended programme of what was to happen to Himself after his death. Not only was He to rise again, but a number of other events were to follow one another, to the extent of at least a single generation. Now, if the catastrophic conception of His second coming was the one which He entertained, it is not easy to see any reason for thus lengthening out the programme of the future. The natural thing would have been that the resurrection and all the other items should be compressed into a single event. Why should there be any delay? He had been tried by delay too long already. Had His thoughts of the future been shaped by His own disappointment, the stupendous hope of His resurrection would have been identified with the complete realisation of all His hopes. But the fact that in His prophecies of the future His resurrection is to be followed by the ascension, and that His second coming is to take place from heaven, points strongly to the conclusion, that His expectations of the future were of the same sober and spiritual order as His thoughts about the present.

The third and final prophecy of Jesus, as far as His doctrine concerning Himself is concerned, is that of the last judgment.

Although the catastrophic ideas of the Jewish Messianic programme were alien to the mind of Christ, He yet looked forward to one catastrophe: in all His teaching about the future the terminus is a final judgment, by which men are to be separated according to character and assigned their respective destinies. Thus in the parable of the Tares and the Wheat, after the long period of uncertainty during which they grow together, there comes a day when the field is reaped and the tares are bound in bundles to be burnt; and in the parable of the Drag-net after the long labour of enclosing the fishes, there comes the moment when they are separated into good and bad. The most grandiose tableau of the judgment is the scene in the twenty-fifth of St. Matthew, in which the nations of men are represented as sheep and goats, which are to be separated into two vast flocks. So marked a feature in the teaching of Jesus is this final day of decision that He refers to it as “that day,” without considering it necessary to specify the purpose to which it is devoted.

Now, in this scene of sublime and universal judgment Jesus is Himself the Judge. There is no thought in His teaching more frequent than this. Across the dim and conflicting images evoked by His other teaching about the future this one point shines with a steady and unchanging light. The writers of the New Testament repeat the fact; but it has its original seat in His own words. Even in the Sermon on the Mount, from which, it is supposed by the ignorant, all reference to the dogmas of Christianity is excluded, He says, “Many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name? and in Thy name have cast out devils; and in Thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity.” In the parable of the Tares it is the Son of man who sends forth “His angels to gather out of His kingdom all things which offend, and them which do iniquity.” On another occasion He says, “The Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then shall He reward every man according to his works;” and in yet another, “Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My words, in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”* Nowhere, however, is His position in this great scene so imposingly set forth as in the passage of the twenty-fifth of St. Matthew already alluded to — “When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory: and before Him shall be gathered all nations; and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.” The next words of this description are “Then shall the King say “; and this description of Jesus as “King” — which is unique among His

* Matt. vii. 21-23 5 x “‘- 4 1; xv ‘- 2 7; Mark viii. 38.

utterances, though the designation is closely akin to “Messiah” — rises spontaneously out of the situation; for the royal glory of the Saviour is nowhere else so impressively revealed. The presence of the angels is especially deserving of notice. They attend Him as a king is surrounded by his courtiers, and they are obviously subordinate; in fact, as they are called in another passage just cited, they are “His” angels.

An important question is, the relation which, in the position of Judge, Jesus is conscious of holding to the Father. The doctrine of the whole Bible is that God is Judge; and certainly it would be in accordance with the general body of Christ’s teaching to assume that He thought of Himself in this character as the Vicegerent of God; for in all His works it was His pride to perform what the Father had given Him to do. This point of view, however, retreats into the background in these descriptions of the judgment, and no pains are taken to cause it to be remembered. Much more “prominence is given to the fact that it is through Him that God judges the world than to the fact that is God who judges the world through Him. In short, Jesus as Judge occupies a position of relative independence; and the spirit of the synoptic representations correspond exactly with the statement in St. John, that” the

Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son.” *

Dr. Wendt, following his usual habit of reducing the grander utterances of Jesus to the lowest possible terms, attempts to destroy the force of these statements by referring to the fact, that the apostles are also said to judge: “In the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” f Manifestly, however, no relative independence is ascribed to them; their presence is entirely subordinate and ministerial. What is said about them has its counterpart in a statement like that of St. James, “Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth and one convert him, let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins” J — where the ordinary Christian is spoken of as if he could convert and save the soul, although the Scripture is unanimous in ascribing salvation to God alone. It may even be questioned whether in what is said about the apostles there is any reference to the last judgment at all. In ancient times to judge was one of the recognised functions of the king, and in the Old Testament it is frequently

* v. 22. t Matt. xix. 28.

J v. 19, 20.

used as equivalent to kingship, the part being put for the whole. When, therefore, it is said that in the regeneration the apostles will sit on thrones and judge, this may only mean that they will be the rulers of the future; as we say of other great figures of the past, that they now rule the world from their thrones.

The place assigned in the last judgment to Himself in the words of Jesus is recognised by all interpreters to imply that the ultimate fate of men is to be determined by their relation to Him. He is the standard by which all shall be measured; and it is to Him as the Saviour that all who enter into eternal life will owe their felicity.* But the description of Himself as Judge implies much more than this: it implies the consciousness of ability to estimate the deeds of men so exactly as to determine with unerring justice their everlasting state. How far beyond the reach of mere human nature such a claim is, it is easy to see. No human being knows another to the bottom; the most ordinary man is a mystery to the most penetrating of his fellow-creatures; the greatest of men would acknowledge that even in a child there are heights

* This is most remarkably emphasized in the twenty-fifth of St. Matthew, where even the deeds by which the fate of the heathen is determined are reckoned as done to Him.

which he cannot reach and depths which he cannot fathom. Who would venture to pronounce a final verdict on the character of a brother man, or to measure out his deserts for a single day? But Jesus ascribed to Himself the ability to determine for eternity the value of the whole life, as made up not only of its obvious acts but of its most secret experiences and its most subtle motives. The sublime consciousness of Himself which this involves is not to be mistaken. Yet it is no more than is implied in the daily necessities of the Christian life. If anything is Christian, it is the habit of praying to the Son of God. As soon as the Church began to live, it began to pray to its ascended Lord. St. Paul speaks of the whole body of believers as those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ; and in the Book of Revelation glory and dominion are ascribed by all saints to Him who hath loved them and washed them from their sins in His own blood. Even the heathen identified the early Christians by this mark, that they met to sing hymns to Jesus as God; and, in every century since, Christians have been the more distinguished by the same practice the more they have been Christian. Everyone remembers how the heart of Samuel Rutherford pours itself out to the “sweet Lord Jesus “; but a cavalier like Jeremy Taylor prays directly to Christ with not a whit more of reserve. The finest hymns of Christendom are nothing but prayers to Christ clothed in the forms of poetry; and in these, every day, tens of thousands confide the secrets of their hearts to what they believe to be a comprehending and sympathetic ear. Does He hear these prayers? does He know His worshippers? is He acquainted with the griefs they lay before Him and with the raptures occasioned by His love? The very existence of Christianity depends on the answer given to this question; and nowhere is it answered more convincingly than in those sayings in which, by calling Himself the Judge of men, Jesus claims to have a perfect acquaintance with the secrets of every human heart.

APPENDICES